Parcels From Home

Parcels From Home: The POW Parcel Scheme and the NZ Red Cross in World War II by Mark Webster and Paul Luker is designed as a multi-touch book for iBooks and draws on archives, records and a decade of research. It includes primary source interview accounts which, in some cases, can be heard, and pictures (some never before published) that expand in superb detail. 


Parcels From Home is the result of research across hundreds of sources and hundreds of hours in archives and museums across New Zealand, and at the New Zealand and Australian Red Cross Headquarters (Wellington, New Zealand and Melbourne, Australia, by permission) and draws on the collections, historical acumen and design expertise of co-author Paul Luker to tell a compelling tale of the very successful efforts to send parcels all the way from distant New Zealand to Allied prisoners in European camps across a world torn by global war. 


A longer Trainspotter Edition will be available from November 2015 (100th anniversary of the NZ Red Cross) and expands on Parcels From Home, with extra detail in each chapter, extra images and numerous reproductions of Red Cross archive documents, extra sound-file content (veterans’ voices) plus a completely new chapter on efforts to get Red Cross parcels to the prisoners of the Japanese.  


Parcels From Home is also the companion volume to Parcels From Home: Jack’s War, a multi-touch book of illustrated creative non-fiction by Steve Bolton. It depicts a fictional New Zealander, Jack Avery, and is set in wartime and prisoner-of-war scenarios that were common to hundreds of New Zealand soldiers to bring this story to life. Jack’s War looks and reads like a graphic novel, but the experience is expanded with sound effects, pop-ups adding historical depth, and an extensive glossary explaining terms, places, military events and more.